Adventures of a Sea Hunter: In Search of Famous Shipwrecks

This atoll, with its beautiful islands, beaches and a lagoon teeming with marine life, is a place with a famous name. It is Bikini, the setting for many American atomic tests between 1946 and 1958, including those of the first nuclear weapons. In July 1946, less than a year after Hiroshima, Bikini Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 4,500 miles west of San Francisco, was the setting for Operation Crossroads, a massive military effort to assess the effects of the atomic bomb on warships. The atoll’s 167-person native population was evacuated. The fallout from those first blasts miraculously fell into the sea and did little to contaminate Bikini.

My eyes are not drawn to the beauty of this tropical paradise, however. Abruptly, the rim of the atoll is interrupted by a dark blue hole. Nearly a mile across, it is the site of a vanished islet. It is also the site where in March 1954, the most powerful nuclear bomb ever was detonated on the surface of the earth by the United States. In an instant, an atomic bomb capable of incinerating an entire city vaporized the islet and cracked the reef. The pulverized coral and sand ejected by the 15-megaton blast traveled high up into the atmosphere, raining down as atomic fallout over thousands of square miles of ocean, nearby islands and ships at sea. Conducted in the name of science, the blast, code-named Castle Bravo, was a Cold War test of America’s new hydrogen bomb. It killed and sickened Pacific islanders, the crew of a Japanese fishing ironically named Lucky Dragon and left behind a horrific legacy.

Bikini is now a deadly place, its abandoned shores littered with rusting machinery and cables, its islands covered by thick concrete bunkers and regimented rows of decaying houses and replanted palm trees intended for the returning Bikinians, who are known as the “nuclear nomads” of the Pacific. Craters from nuclear blasts pock the bottom of Bikini’s lagoon. Inside the shallow dish of one of those craters rests the sunken fleet of Operation Crossroads. Like the debris on the islands and along the shores of the atoll, the sunken ships of Bikini are an archeological legacy of the beginning of the nuclear age. Our National Park Service team, about to land on the atoll, will be the first to survey this ghost fleet now that the radioactivity has diminished to a safe level. Looking down at the crater made by Castle Bravo, we all silently cross ourselves and wonder just what we will find and what other legacies may lurk in the water and the ships.

OPERATION CROSSROADS

Operation Crossroads was the result of months of inter-service rivalry and a postwar scramble to assess the military potentials and perils of the atomic bomb. The New York Herald Tribune, in a post-Hiroshima editorial, commented: “The victory or defeat of armies, the fate of nations, the rise and fall of empires are all alike, in any long perspective only the ripples on the surface of history; but the unpredictable unlocking of the inconceivable energy of the atom would stir history itself to its deepest depths.” Editorials suggesting that the advent of the atom bomb had forever changed warfare alarmed military officers, who did not like reading that “it should make an end of marching, rolling, and even flying armies, and turn most of our battleships into potential scrap.” The atomic tests at Bikini would test the truth of that argument.

The tests were appealing for more than technical reasons. They would demonstrate to the world, particularly the Soviet Union, the power and wealth of the United States. In April 1946, Admiral William H. Blandy, commander of the joint Army-Navy task force conducting the tests, told the nation in a live radio broadcast that the upcoming tests would “help us to be what the world expects our great, non-aggressive and peace-loving country to be — the leader of those nations which seek nothing but a just and lasting peace.” More bluntly, commentator Raymond Gram Swing stated that Operation Crossroads, “the first of the atomic era war games … is a notice served on the world that we have the power and intend to be heeded.”

The decision to use the atomic bomb test to destroy ships of the once-feared Imperial Japanese Navy would also emphasize America as the principal victor in the war. One newspaper account, accompanied by an Associated Press photograph of twenty-four battered-looking destroyers and submarines, crowed: “Trapped Remnants of Jap Fleet Face Destruction in United States Navy Atom-Bomb Tests.” The use of Japanese warships as atomic targets was a “symbolic killing” with the same weapon that had forced Japan’s capitulation. The battleship Nagato particularly fulfilled that role. The onetime flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy and the scene of operational planning for the attack on Pearl Harbor, Nagato had been “captured” as a bombed-out derelict on Tokyo Bay in September 1945. The capture, an event staged by military press officers, symbolized “the complete and final surrender of the Imperial Japanese Navy.” Sinking the same battleship with an atomic bomb would ritually “destroy” the Imperial Japanese Navy in a more dramatic manner than prosaic scrapping or scuttling at sea. The battleship’s intended fate was so important that, at Bikini, American support vessels were moored alongside Nagato since “there was some danger that the captured Japanese ships … might actually sink… if they were left unattended.”

At the same time, military planners wanted to show that the United States Navy would survive in the coming nuclear age. According to Admiral Blandy, testing the bomb on warships would improve the Navy: “We want ships that are tough, even when threatened by atomic bombs; we want to keep the ships afloat, propellers turning, guns firing; we want to protect the crews so that, if fighting is necessary, they can fight well today and return home unharmed tomorrow.”

To further test the effects of the bomb, the military loaded twenty-two of the target ships with fuel and ammunition as well as 220 tons of equipment: tanks, tractors and airplanes; guns, mortars and ammunition; radios, fire extinguishers and telephones; gas masks, watches and uniforms; canned food and frozen meat. They also placed sixty-nine target airplanes on the ships and moored two seaplanes in the water near them.

The first test took place on July 1, 1946. The B-29 Dave’s Dream dropped a 20- kiloton plutonium bomb on the target fleet, slightly to starboard of the bow of the attack transport Gilliam. Caught in the explosion’s incandescent fireball and battered down into the water by the shock wave, Gilliam, “badly ruptured, crumpled, and twisted almost beyond recognition,” sank in seventy-nine seconds. The blast swept the nearby transport Carlisle 150 feet to one side and nearly wiped away the superstructure and masts. Carlisle began to burn and sank in thirty minutes. The destroyer Anderson, hit hard by the blast, burst into flames when her ammunition exploded. Burning fiercely, Anderson capsized to port and sank by the stern within seven minutes. The destroyer Lamson, its hull torn open, sank twelve minutes after the blast. The Japanese cruiser Sakawa, badly battered, caught on fire and sank the following day.

The second test took place three weeks later. The Navy remoored the target ships around a bomb lowered 90 feet below the surface. When the underwater atomic bomb erupted at 8:34 on the morning of July 25, a huge mass of steam and water mounded up into a “spray dome” that climbed at a rate of 2,500 feet per second and formed a 975-foot thick column. Its core was a nearly hollow void of superheated steam that rose faster than the more solid 300-foot thick water sides, climbing 11,000 feet per second and acting as a chimney for the hot gases of the fireball. The gases, mixed with excavated lagoon bottom and radioactive materials, formed a mushroom cloud atop the column. The upward blast crushed, capsized and sank the battleship Arkansas in less than a second.

The blast also created “atomic tidal waves.” The first wave, a 94-foot wall of radioactive water, lifted and crashed into the aircraft carrier Saratoga with such force that it twisted the hull. The falling water also partially smashed the flight deck, and Saratoga sank within seven and a half hours. Nagato, its hull broken open, sank two days later. Beneath the water, the immense pressure of the bomb’s burst crushed three submarines that settled onto the seabed, leaking air bubbles and oil.

On the surface, a boiling cloud of radioactive water and steam penetrated the surviving ships. Radioactive material adhered to wooden decks, paint, rust and grease. For weeks after the tests, the Navy tried to wash off the fallout with water and lye, sending crews aboard the contaminated ships to scrub off paint, rust and scale with long-handled brushes, holystones and any other “available means.” In August, worried about radiation, Admiral Blandy cancelled plans for a third test and gave orders to sink badly damaged ships. As Operation Crossroads steamed away from Bikini, it towed the battered, irradiated fleet of targets to nearby Kwajalein, and then to Pearl Harbor, Bremerton in Washington, and Hunter’s Point and Mare Island in California. There, sailors stripped the hulks of ammunition and left them to rust.

Starting in 1948, the Navy began taking the Crossroads target ships to sea and sinking them. The explanation was that the sinkings were part of training exercises and tests of new weapons. That year, Dr. David Bradley, M.D., a radiological safety monitor at Bikini, published his journal of the tests in a book titled No Place to Hide. It stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for ten weeks. No